Blogging India

getting stuck in traffic…

i want live traffic
reports!

im new to the city…

i want
directions!

i want auto fares, bus routes, and car
pool information as well!
Yes, and now its possible.

If you don’t know about it already, its high time you knew Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re from Bangalore, Hyderabad or Chennai, you can get directions, you can get live traffic reports, and you can get them as SMSes on your mobile!

Bangalore Transport Information System, or BTIS, gives you live traffic reports – where’s busy, and where’s not; whether its offpeak time, or peak time; whether there is a road block, or not. It can also provide directions, along with bus routes. It can also help you to carpool. And best of all, all this can be accessed by SMSing! Apart from these, the website also provides information on the city traffic, safety regulations, rules and so on.

A project by Mapunity and Airtel, the online Transport Information System concept began with their pilot project in Hyderabad. Immediately, BTIS was launched, and now Chennai is in the beta stages.

When Live Traffic is clicked, you get a map wherein the roads are marked with green, orange, or red buttons. Green means that the traffic is ok. Orange means that the traffic is moderately high, and Red means that the traffic is very high, and most probably blocked.

If you want traffic directions, go to Directions, and enter the place from where you want to travel, and you destination. Then click Go and you’re in business. The map shows a line, which is the path you must take. It also displays the distance, average auto fare, and bus routes. You can zoom in on areas. You can get the directions by SMS as well.

Best of all, if you have GPRS enabled on your mobile, you can get all features of BTIS on your mobile. Like a semi GPS!

Currently, Mapunity has these information systems for Bangalore (BTIS), Hyderabad (HTIS), and Chennai (CTIS). Well,
next time you’re in doubt about directions, or if you want a quick check on traffic before you go, or if you want to research side streets to use, you know where to go

[tags]BTIS, HTIS, CTIS, bangalore, hyderabad, chennai, traffic, bangalore traffic, traffic problems, directions, car pool, auto fare, bangalore traffic information system, traffic information system[/tags]

MPlayer, as I had mentioned in my previous post on my Top 3 Audio/Video players, is a media player for Linux, which supports almost all kinds of audio and video formats. It can even play semi-corrupted, and semi-downloaded files. And it rates # 1, as my most favourite and preferred video player.

It is, by creation, a player for Linux, coded by Astral and team. It is essentially a command line operated player, but later on GUIs were introduced for it. Of late, it has GUIs even in Windows, but these GUIs are not very stable, and often destroy the stable credibility of MPlayer. The MPlayer is now available for all operating systems – Linux, Unix based OSes, Windows, and Mac OS X.

How to install MPlayer -

For Linux, go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . They have a very good explanation on how to install MPlayer on Linux. Of late, MPlayer comes as the default AV(audio/video) player in many Linux distros.

For Mac OS X, go to http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/ . They’ve developed a very good GUI for MPlayer on Mac. Its as simple as download, install, and drag and drop to play.

For Windows, the procedure is a bit more tedious, but worth the effort.

1. Go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html and download the MPlayer 1.0rc2 Windows.
2. After downloading, unzip the package to somewhere easy to remember. For example, unzip it to C:\Program Files\MPlayer so that its easy to locate at a future date.
3. For Windows XP and 2000, go to Step 4. For Windows 98 and previous, go to step 5.
4. Next, go to your Documents and Settings folder. By default, it will be in the root directory, C:\, but could differ if you’ve changed the location or have installed Windows in a different directory. In Documents and Settings, chose the folder which corresponds to your Windows username. i.e. If your Windows username is Geekboy. open the folder Geekboy in the Documents and Settings folder. Inside that folder, there will be a hidden folder called SendTo. If you can see it, open it. If you can’t, either enable the View Hidden Folders (Tools > Folder Options > View > Show Hidden Files and Folders > OK) or append "SendTo" (without the quotes) in the address bar. Go to step 6.
5. (for Windows 98 and previous versions) Go to your Windows folder (by default, it should be C:\Windows\). There will be a hidden folder named "SendTo". Open it. (if you can’t see it, either append SendTo to the address bar, or enable viewing of hidden files by going to Folder Options).
6. Create a shortcut (Right Click > New > Shortcut) and point the shortcut to a file named mplayer.exe in our MPlayer folder (in our example, C:\Program Files\MPlayer\mplayer.exe). You’re all set to go!
7. Now, to play a file using MPlayer, right click on the file, and scroll over Send To  and click Mplayer. Enjoy!

To get an idea of the controls in Windows, go to Interactive Control in the MPlayer Manual.

But here are a few basic controls -

• f – to toggle fullscreen
• arrow keys – to fast forward/rewind
• Page Up and Page Down – to fast forward/rewind by 10 minutes
• p – Pause/Play
• q or Esc – to quit
• / and * OR 9 and 0 - increase and decrease volume
• m – to mute sound
• o – to toggle timer

Those are the basic controls. There are more advanced controls for everything from increase/decrease movie speed to adjusting hue/brightness/colour etc. Check out Interactive Control for more information.

Supported Media Formats

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs* Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
• Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV
• Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer

I hope that this post was useful and informative. Enjoy the MPlayer world!

[tags]MPlayer, media player for linux, linux media player, MPlayer windows, Windows media, play all formats, movie player, best media player[/tags]

Hello all,

I’ve often been asked which was my favourite AV player. Five years ago, I used to respond with "Winamp" or "Power DVD". But now, I should say, my opinions have changed. And thats why I laugh when people say that their favourite player is Real Player, or QuickTime. Right now, after having used most of the available audio/video playing software, I have formed a few of my favourites. And I thought that I would share them with you…

# 1 – Mplayer

Mplayer – an audio/video player for Linux, comes in as my all time favourite AV player. It can play as many video or audio clips as you want simultaneously. It has never crashed for me. It can play semi downloaded files, files with the wrong extension, and once, it has even played a zipped file! Any file with an audio or video track can be played with Mplayer. On Windows, you need to do a manual install, with a Send To shortcut to make it work. It does not have a GUI, but its amazingly powerful. Visit the Mplayer website for more information. Information on how to install and use Mplayer in your Windows system coming up in my next post.

# 2 – VLC Player

Almost as powerful as Mplayer, with a neat GUI, ladies and gentlemen, in second position comes VLC Player. Cross platform support and freeware – 2 words which make VLC magical! It can, like Mplayer, play isolated DVD files, all sorts of music and video files. But sometimes, especially in case of a defective DVD video file, your system hangs. If you like power, and no fancy stuff, but still a GUI, go in for VLC Player.

# 3 – Windows Media Player 11

Stylish and hot, WMP 11 creates a whole new AV experience for Windows users. Free to install for "genuine" Windows users, this awesome looking player is a complete package for any home user. Vista looks, audio/video tweaking, library feature, sync with music players, stable performance etc. are the main features of WMP 11. It comes in as # 3, even above iTunes, because of its fast and stable performance, cool looks, and easy to use sync feature. You can download WMP 11 from the Microsoft website.

Yes, thats my top 3. I hope that you’ve found this post useful. And no, Real Player, QuickTime etc. are not among my favourites. In fact they feature at the end of my favour list… Just below my top 3, comes DivX, iTunes, Powe DVD etc.

[tags]top 3, audio video players, audio players, video players, audio software, video software, av software, top 3 audio video players[/tags]

Hello,

Many of us would have wanted to shift from Blogger to Wordpress. But you must be put off by the fact that you would have to start all over again – visitors, feeds, Google PR, advertisers and so on… I’ve seen very many posts on the technical details on how to make the shift. A week back, my friend Amit from Digital Inspiration posted a blog on how to make the shift from Blogger to Wordpress without lasting damage in terms of visitors, RSS readers, and so on.

I found it quite useful, but since I didn’t have any more Blogger blogs (atleast none with a huge visitor count and stats) I couldn’t test it… It might turn out to be very useful for you. I reccomend this article as a MUST READ for anyone planning to shift from Blogger to Wordpress.

Check out Digital Inspiration.

Cheers

[tags]blogger to wordpress, shifting, blogs[/tags]

Disclaimer : I found this on Digg. Thanks to Nirmal. We envision that you use the information given below for legal(or educational) purposes only. Thank you.

Hi all,
Here’s a cool tool named Google Hack which allows to you easily search for the file of your choice – be it music, video, lyrics, hacks, caches items, fonts, proxies, torrents, applications or books.

Google has in built search queries which can be used to effectively track down these files, but these long codes need to be appended to the search term. Who will bother to do that?

So here, a few smart guys have released a cool program which will surely reduce your search time, and increase your search accuracy, when you’re searching for such, uh, ‘unconventional’ things.

Google Hacks hosted at Google CODE is a program available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Download the appropriate file, and enjoy Googling

Ladies and gentlemen,

   Today is Blog Action Day. Today, we bloggers around the world, including certain hi-fi bloggers like Lifehacker, GigaOm, Google Blog, and so on, participate to help spread the word about a cause. A cause, which needs much concern for it is necessary for sustainable development. The cause, which many of us easily ignore in our haste. Our environment.

   So I was thinking all day about what I would blog about. Finally, I decided to settle for a simple, but useful topic, and I decided to stick to the Indian context, because this blog is chiefly to serve Indian people (sorry people ).

   Here are a few things which I think could make an impact. These are the few basic things, which, though we know, we always tend to ignore.

• Please switch off all lights, fans and air conditioning when leaving a room. (Savings on your electricity bill, helps reduce global power consumption, helps reduce power crisis and blackouts, helps reduce global warming)
• Draw back the curtains, and utilize sunlight instead of the bulb in the mornings.(Savings on your electricity bill, helps reduce global power consumption, helps reduce power crisis and blackouts, helps reduce global warming)
• Use CFLs instead of incandescent bulbs.(Energy efficiency, savings on your electricity bill, helps reduce global power consumption, helps reduce power crisis and blackouts, helps reduce global warming)
• Please please please please do not waste water. Please turn off a tap while not in use. Shave using a mug of water. And turn off the tap while brushing your teeth.
• Reduce, reuse, recycle.
• Reuse paper. In small scale offices and industries, review your paper policy. (Savings on paper, help save trees)
• Put your PCs and laptops on Stand By mode when not in use. Helps save power, and extends the life of the computer.
• Ever tried purchasing wrinkle free shirts and trousers? Saves on the electricity bill BIG TIME (and helps our lazy chaps like me )
• Use plastic bags and bottles again, and again, and again, and again….
• Do you have any idea how newspapers can be reused? Of course, you can sell it to have it recycled, but you can reuse a bit of it yourself, and save a little bit of money (you can also boast to your friends). What can you make from a newspaper you ask? Temporary table covers, napkins, gift wrapping (especially the comics page), working paper, temporary wraps, file contents separater, CD cover (I’ll be posting that "How to" next time) and so on and so forth… The list is endless.
• Use public transport whenever feasible. Try to car pool / bike pool. If you’re in Bangalore, visit www.btis.in to find pooling partners. Offer lifts to those who ask for it. Try to reduce air travel. By doing these, you will be helping to reduce the energy crisis, saving a lot of money, and making a bunch of good friends . (Oops, forgot to mention, WALK wherever possible)

By doing these simple things, you can help ensure yourself, and others, a better life, and a better future environment. Something you should understand (and what my friend keeps saying every single time I mention environmental conservation) is that, you, or I, as a single person can’t do a thing. But if one Billion people of India conserve power, fuel, and water, there definitely WILL be a change. So spread the word, practice conservation methods, and encourage others to do the same.

The steps above are just my views. You’re free to form your own views, ideologies, and methods. Go ahead, spread them, maybe comment here, I’ll add them to the list. Also remember, all these steps cannot be followed in every walk of our life. We’re not fanatics! What we can do is help little by little. Practice little one day, a little more another day, and so on. And finally, we might actually end up saving our world .

And for the move active and time savvy of you, here a few more things to do -

• Publicize the cause, and the need. Many people publicize just the cause, and not the need. This leads to false beliefs, and false beliefs to unacceptancy.
• Openly support environmental causes. Use your area of expertise to do your best. Everyone could be a part of it. If you’re a journalist, write about it. If you’re a radio jockey, talk about it. If you’re a web designer, make websites about it. If you’re a software engineer, help organize it. If you’re an LIC agent, talk to your clients about it in every meeting. If you’re an service man at Cafe’ Coffee Day, talk to your customers about it, and maybe distribute extra tissue papers with the logo for the cause?!!!
• Adopt a tree. Adopting a tree isn’t as simple as what we see our politicians do. We don’t just plant a sapling, pour some water and leave it there. Adopting a tree will mean planting it, watering it daily, pruning it, helping it to grow, and protecting it.
• Launch campaigns, and conduct speeches in public areas, schools, colleges, and other educational institutions.
• Conduct such talks in otherwise neglected areas like orphanages and old age homes as well.

   I hope that I’ve made my point. I hope that someone will take off from here, and I hope that we can together, create a revolution, produce a change, and delay the inevitable. Peace!

[tags]blog action day, environment, 11 ways to go green, green India, green @ India, environmental conservation, save environment, power crisis, energy crisis, reduce, reuse, recycle[/tags]

Hi all,
    How would a person feel when there’s a virus on a system, when he cant access Task manager to end the virus process or access regedit to zoom it to hell? Well, thats exactly what happened to me. All my college computers were inflicted with so many viruses, that even a trio of Norton, Avast and NOD32 couldn’t come to the rescue. And Task Manager was blocked. So was regedit. Apparently, “Task Manager has been disabled by your Administrator” and “Registry editing has been blocked by your Administrator“.  My first reaction was to call up the admin and use a few well chosen swear words.

    But thankfully, it didn’t come to that, since Windows was Windows, and everything had a back door or two . So what do you do to re enable task manager and/or regedit when your admin has blocked them? Follow the few simple steps below -

• Hit Windows+R to bring up Run (Start>Run)
• Type in gpedit.msc and click OK
• For regedit : In the Group Policy window, browse to User Configuration>System and voila, you should have a small entry named “Prevent access to registry editing tools“. Double click that entry. Check the Disabled option, and click OK. Your regedit.exe has just been enabled .
• For Task Manager : In the Group Policy window, browse to User Configuration>System>Ctrl+Alt+Del Options and you’ll have an entry titled “Remove Task Manager“. Double click that entry. Check the Disabled option, and click OK. Your Task Manager has just been enabled . Go ahead, hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and rejoice .

    Thats it guys, I hope this has been useful. Oh by the way, this post was intended for purely educational uses. Any damage you create by fiddling with these options are your own fault! Toodles!

Hi guys,
    Here’s a useful little post. Were you ever fed up with the same old Windows XP logon screen(Welcome screen)? Well, you can change it quite easily. There are 2 methods, one for the less tech savvy and the other for the more tech savvy.

I. The easy method

• Download a software called Logon Loader [~310 KB] (its a freeware, available for download here)
• Download a preferred login screen from the different sources. A few good sources are -
• Deviant Art
• ThemeXP.org
• Once you finish downloading the logon screen, open up Logon Loader, browse to the downloaded Login Screen (it will be a .exe file) and apply it. Voila, you’re done!

II. The method for the tech savvy

• Download a preferred login screen from the different sources. A few good sources are -
• Deviant Art
• ThemeXP.org
• Copy the downloaded login screen .exe file into the C:/windows/system32/ folder and note the file name
• Enter regedit (Windows Key+R > Run > regedit)
• Browse to 
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon
  
• In that folder, find a key named UIHost. Change the name of this key to the name of your new login screen file name
• Under that key, change the value of the UIHost to the name of your new login screen file name
• Cheers
  

Thats it guys, have fun Oh by the way, my favourite login screen is http://magarita.deviantart.com/art/With-49055926

<thanks to http://articles.networktechs.com/58-p2.php>

[tags]windows, login screen, welcome, screen, change, windows xp[/tags]

Hi all,
    I’m sure that all of us must have, at some time or the other, wanted to download a YouTube video. We were reduced to stupid ad-filled add ons in Firefox which were rather slow, and usually ended up messing downloads. But it was just a matter of time ladies and gentlemen. Now we have a brand new service called KissYouTube which features the easiest and most versatile way to download YouTube videos.

    KissYouTube is different since it has the most userfriendly, easy and stable method of downloading YouTube files. And how exactly do you do it?

• Browse to the clip you want to download in YouTube (eg: The India Pakistan World Twenty20 Bowl Out clip – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa4m5J6mgm8)
• Append the url with a “kiss” in front of you tube. (in the above example, http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=Wa4m5J6mgm8)
• Click Download Now and save as a .flv file.

                      OR

• Get the URL of the clip you want to download (eg : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa4m5J6mgm8)
• Go to www.kissyoutube.com and paste the URL into the YouTube URL box and click Go
• Repeat Step 3 in the 1st method

    As simple as that and you have your YouTube video all downloaded and ready Have fun!

[tags]youtube, video, download, kissyoutube, video download, free youtube video download[/tags]

Hi all,
The w32.USBworm, or commonly known as the Orkut Mozilla Hater Virus, has been spreading its malicious fingers all over India. The worm, quite a tricky one, is most commonly seen when it displays messages like, “I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…”, “ORKUT IS BANNED, Orkut is banned you fool“, “The administrators didn’t write this program guess who did??“, “youtube IS BANNED,youtube is banned you fool” and “The administrators didn’t write this program guess who did??`r`r MUHAHAHA!!,30“.

This worm has been around for around 4 months now, with scattered responses, and many bloggers posting different methods of removing it. Here, I’ve compiled the instructions from a few of those blogs, and added my own few failsafes into them.

What it does

• Runs in the background, invisible to antiviruses
• When Mozilla Firefox is opened, it displays a message (I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…) and shuts down Firefox
• When the site Orkut is accessed, via any browser, it shows yet another message out of a few listed above, and shuts down the browser.
• Same when YouTube is accessed.
• Copies itself automatically onto USBs, iPods (yes!), Digicams etc. when connected to the PC
• Copies a copy of the virus from the USBs, iPods etc. to any other PC its inserted in.
• Disables the “Show Hidden Folders” option

How it functions

• It runs an executable file named svchost.exe in the background
• All virus files located in a folder in the C:\ drive
• The folder is hidden, and disables the option to view hidden folders
• Comfortably carries out its malicious activities and also makes the computer dead slow

Why its dangerous

• It makes the computer slow.
• No antivirus to date has been able to remove or detect this virus. A few antiviruses, like AVG, NOD32 and Avast, were able to prevent its entry.

Removal

The removal of this virus requires a manual procedure. It may take anywhere around 5-10 minutes. It has 4 main steps -
1) Removing the virus from the task manager
2) Deleting the virus files
3) Deleting registry entries
4) Editing the registry to restore the “View Hidden Files” option

I – Removing the virus from the task manager

1. Hit Alt+Ctrl+Del to bring up the Task Manager
2. Click on the Processes tab
3. Click on Image Name to arrange the processes according to their names
4. Scroll down a bit until you reach a number of SVCHOST.exe processes listed
5. All, but one, of these SVCHOST.exe processes will be listed under the usernames of SYSTEM or NETWORK SERVICE
6. Find the SVCHOST.exe which is listed under YOUR username. i.e. If your username is anoop, find the SVCHOST.exe listed under with username anoop. Select that process and click End Process.
7. Click Yes to successfully end the process.

(Picture credit : Sujith)

II – Deleting the virus files

1. Browse to your C:\ drive, or whichever drive you’ve installed Windows.
2. In the address bar, type in heap41a after the C:\ and press Enter. i.e. In the address bar, type C:\heap41a  and press Enter.
3. Mercilessly delete every file in that folder. Muhahahahhahahahaha! You’ve now deleted the virus!

III – Deleting the registry entries

1. Go to Start>Run (or Windows key + R)
   
2. Type in regedit and hit Enter
3. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
   CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\Run and delete the winlogon key. This will prevent any remnants of the worm from starting at booting.

IV Editing the registry to restore the “View Hidden Files” option

1. In Regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden
   
2. There, navigate to NOHIDDEN
3. In NOHIDDEN, change the CheckedValue to “0″ and DefaultValue to “1″.
4. Go one step back, and navigate to SHOWALL
5. In SHOWALL, change the CheckedValue to “1″.

Thats it

Prevention

1. Be careful when you insert any pen drive/iPod. Delete any file named autorun.inf and any .exe file inside a folder, carrying the same name as the folder name.
2. Update your antivirus. Switch to Avast!, NOD32, AVG or Norton.
3. TechSupport Forum has uploaded a disinfectant, which you can download and use.

Thats it ladies and gentlemen. Beware of the w32.USBWorm. If you find any computer displaying messages like “orkut is banned!” or “I DNT HATE MOZILLA”, remember these steps and blast that worm to where it came from!

I’ve compiled my instructions from Harish, Sujith and Mahesh. Thanks guys!

Cheers, and enjoy

[tags]orkut, mozilla, youtube, hater, virus, w32.USBworm, removal, cannot view hidden files, unhide option not working, fix[/tags]